Deeplinks Blog posts about Security

Today, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the R&D arm of the US military) is holding the finals for its Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) competition at DEF CON. We think that this initiative by DARPA is very cool, very innovative, and could have been a little dangerous.

Wednesday, July 20 is the final day of EFF's Summer Security Reboot, a two-week membership drive that focuses on taking stock of our digital security practices and bolstering the larger movement to protect digital civil liberties. Besides a reduced donation amount for the Silicon level membership, the Reboot features sets of random number generators: EFF dice with instructions on how to generate stronger and more memorable random passphrases.

It’s been a rough month for Internet freedom in Russia. After it breezed through the Duma, President Putin signed the “Yarovaya package" into law—a set of radical “anti-terrorism” provisions drafted by ultra-conservative United Russia politician Irina Yarovaya, together with a set of instructions on how to implement the new rules. Russia’s new surveillance laws include some of Bad Internet Legislation’s greatest hits, such as mandatory data retention and government backdoors for encrypted communications—policies that EFF has opposed in every country where they’ve been proposed.

A large community of security researchers and public interest groups have been alarmed by the security implications of baking DRM into the HTML5 standard. That's because DRM -- unlike all the other technology that the W3C has ever standardized — enjoys unique legal protection under a tangle of international laws, like the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Canada's Bill C-11, and EU laws that implement Article 6 of the EUCD.

We wrote about a case last week that was deeply disturbing: a federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia held that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a personal computer located inside their home. In this court’s view, the FBI is free to hack into networked devices (aka, pretty much everything) without a warrant.

Fortunately, this is only the opinion of a single district court judge, so it’s not controlling precedent throughout the country. But the decision makes one thing clear: we need to stop the changes to Rule 41, amendments that will make it easier for the government to get a warrant to remotely search computers.